Greenburgh activists Dorrine Livson looks at a monitoring well from a oil spill at Frank's Nursery which the town plans to build a sports complex on Nov. 7, 2012. / Ricky Flores/The Journal News

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Town Supervisor Paul Feiner declared victory Tuesday night when Greenburgh voters resoundingly approved the town’s lease with a private outfit that wants to build a sprawling sports bubble on town-owned land at the former Frank’s Nursery on Route 100B by Elmwood Country Club.

The Game On 365 sports bubble — and its adjoining outdoor turf field — would help slake the demand for athletic facilities from the region’s vibrant youth-sports community and bring much-needed investment to the abandoned site.

But as Greenburgh and Game On 365 move forward with their plans, some residents say they won’t halt their campaign to stop the $7 million project, which will be built on a site where an environmental study found contaminants in the soil and groundwater. The study, made public on Nov. 2, less than a week before the vote, revealed concentrations of semi-volatile organic compounds that exceed standards for commercial and residential uses.

Volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds have seeped into the groundwater running under the 7-acre site, which percolates through fill dumped there in the late 1960s from downtown White Plains’ urban renewal project. Some of the contaminants may emanate from a 500-gallon oil spill, which occurred in 2001 and has yet to be cleaned up.

Making this site safe for children could cost millions of dollars — far more than the $125,000 that Game On 365 has agreed to pay, and significantly more than the $400,000 limit that would allow the town or the developer to walk away from the lease.

Greenburgh acquired the site in February 2011 after Frank’s declared bankruptcy and failed to pay a tax bill that had risen to $1.4 million. Instead of selling the property, as required under county tax law, Greenburgh has decided to lease it for 15 years, contending that it can do so because voters approved the deal in a referendum.

“We kept telling the town that they needed to know what’s happening there before signing any lease,” says Dorrine Livson, president of the Worthington-Woodlands Civic Association. “They still haven’t tested the entire site. The town seems clueless.”

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I met Livson and Edgemont civic leader Bob Bernstein Wednesday morning at the site, where grass grows up through the vast parking lot that shows evidence of test borings drilled to detect the poisons, and monitoring wells installed by Frank’s that no longer track the contaminants’ underground movement.

Both said residents might have voted differently if they’d known the extent of the contamination, which even the town has yet to fully discover. The Town Board voted on Nov. 1 to spend $70,000 on additional environmental studies, which include drilling new monitoring wells.

Feiner, who has muscled his way forward on the project, says he feels good about the referendum, which proved the townspeople supported his recreation initiative. He maintains the town is dedicated to cleaning up the site, which has been under town control for 21 months.

“It will add to the quality of life,” Feiner says. “But nothing is going to be built until we get the seal of approval that it is safe for kids.”

That seal of approval would come from the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which has shown no sense of urgency to clean up the site. The state hasn’t ordered the oil spill to be cleaned up because it “does not pose any off-site impacts,” DEC spokeswoman Charsleissa King wrote in an email. But she said the DEC has asked for “further investigation and remediation” if the town chooses to develop the property. The DEC stands ready, she says, to receive Greenburgh’s application for the state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program.

Over the past decade, several Westchester school districts discovered that building athletic fields atop construction debris and questionable fill has proved an expensive proposition. Fill-for-fields projects in Eastchester, Valhalla, and Greenburgh — designed to save tax dollars — backfired after state environmental regulators intervened, and substantial costs were incurred for environmental studies and groundwater monitoring. Health concerns fueled by contaminated fill on school yards in Eastchester and Valhalla brought costly remediation.

Cancer fears led to field closures at Briarcliff Manor Middle-High School in 2010 after the district had failed to follow through on a consent order signed in 2003 to test and remediate the site. Three Briarcliff families whose children contracted serious illnesses or died from cancer have commenced legal action against the district, contending that their children’s exposure to the playing fields contributed to their illnesses.

A plan to install an earthen cap over the Briarcliff fields, which cover 2.6 acres, awaits approval by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the state Department of Health. And here’s the bottom line: It will cost $2 million to cap the Briarcliff fields. The Frank’s site is almost three times larger.